After Schröder's Defeat and What Looks Like Chirac's, the World Will Face a Paradox…

The specters haunting the troubled French soul are many and varied as a critical vote on a wordy European constitution approaches

writes Roger Cohen in the International Herald Tribune:

Polish plumbers (determined to steal French jobs); Turkish hordes (with similar intent); unfettered "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism; a domineering United States; and, not least, Brussels bureaucrats.

If that seems a motley collection of menaces on which to base an important decision, so be it. The French economy, unlike the British, is sagging, and the search for scapegoats is on.

The word "non" resides somewhere deep in the French psyche, summoning images of bracing defiance from Astérix to De Gaulle.

… If the French president has been anything this past decade, he has been "Monsieur Counterweight," a leader determined to build the European Union into a force cohesive enough to offset, even challenge, the United States. A French rejection of a constitution designed to give Europe a foreign minister and a hint of federalist heft would bury that vision for the foreseeable future.

But perhaps it has already died. A strong EU was always unthinkable without a vibrant German-French core.

… "Look," [UMP deputy named Nicolas Dupont-Aignan] said, "I just spent over $1 million in my home town of Yerres on modernizing 16 traffic lights because there's some EU regulation saying the yellow light has to flash automatically when they break down. That's the price of a new school."

He went on to describe the constitution as "like the Soviet Union's in its attempt to lay down economic policy, an example we should not be emulating." While that claim is an exaggeration, it is true that the third part of the treaty goes into considerable detail on economic principles whose place in a document of this kind seems dubious.

… To see in it a Trojan Horse bent on the destruction of the European welfare state is merely to betray a deep anxiety about global economic forces.

… If [Chirac's] vision is defeated Sunday, after Schröder's defeat last weekend, the world will face this paradox: The lauded European leaders of resistance to an unpopular war in Iraq punished at the polls after that war's proponents — George Bush and Tony Blair — have been endorsed. That outcome is not inevitable, but it's likely — and worth pondering.

As noted earlier, it is not only Bush and Blair, but all the coalition allies in Iraq who have faced elections or weathered similar storms — Spain's Aznar, Australia's Howard, Denmark's Rasmussen, and Italy's Berlusconi — who have been expected to prevail, and who have survived (unless a bomb strategically placed three day before a given election upset the political order). Bruised and battered, perhaps, in some cases, but they still emerged the winners.